Pause and Reflect

Live life with the passion to love, the courage to dream and the perseverance to succeed.

[stars-bean]

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise

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Why Cut Fruit Is An Asian Language Of Love

Life is filled with bitter and hard things. When you extract pits, piths, and peels, fruit becomes a reliable source of pure sweetness, only softness.

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给她一个家 有时候看似简单的愿望，却越难实现。

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It's the festive season when people gather enthusiastically, willingly, out of obligations, in the name of duty, grudgingly, for the sake of tradition, out of habit... a combination perhaps. This is my second time seated in a dark room by myself. The first perhaps less than a decade ago? Or more? The memory is fuzzy. It's money well spent. Therapy is more costly.

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9 Out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work

They’d give up a significant amount of their future earnings.

The trillion dollar question, then, was just how much is meaning worth to the individual employee? If you could find a job that offered you consistent meaning, how much of your current salary would you be willing to forego to do it? We asked this of our 2,000+ respondents. On average, our pool of American workers said they’d be willing to forego 23% of their entire future lifetime earnings in order to have a job that was always meaningful. The magnitude of this number supports one of the findings from Shawn’s recent study on the Conference for Women. In a survey of attendees, he found that nearly 80% of the respondents would rather have a boss who cared about them finding meaning and success in work than receive a 20% pay increase. To put this figure in perspective, consider that Americans spend about 21% of their incomes on housing. Given that people are willing to spend more on meaningful work than on putting a roof over their heads, the 21st century list of essentials might be due for an update: “food, clothing, shelter — and meaningful work.”

A second related question is: How much is meaning worth to the organization? Employees with very meaningful work, we found, spend one additional hour per week working, and take two fewer days of paid leave per year. In terms of sheer quantity of work hours, organizations will see more work time put in by employees who find greater meaning in that work.

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Society urgently needs to shift its view of mathematics. It’s time for everyone to regard numeracy with the same kind of importance as literacy.

We are at an unparalleled point in history where our everyday experiences are governed by mathematical structures. Doctors make medical diagnoses, judges decide criminal sentences, and actuaries set insurance premiums on the basis of algorithms and computing systems that all run on the principles of mathematics.

And they should - many of the problems we must solve are far too complex for any single human being to comprehend on their own. The industrial revolution devised mechanical muscles to work on tasks that we find physically impossible; the information revolution is devising mechanical minds to work on tasks that we find mentally impossible.

This is why mathematics is key to human flourishing. Just as advances in agriculture and industrial technology allowed us to feed masses and keep cities healthy, advances in mathematical thinking form the underpinning of modern society as we know it.

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The idea that non-believers in God lack morality has been disputed by new research, experts said. A common supposition – that of the purposeless disbeliever, lacking anything to ascribe ultimate meaning to the universe – does not bear scrutiny, a university study said. Most endorse objective moral values and human dignity at similar rates to the general populations in their countries, the report presented at the Vatican said. One of the authors, University of Kent sociologist Dr Lois Lee, said: “These findings show once and for all that the public image of the atheist is a simplification at best, and a gross caricature at worst.“Instead of relying on assumptions about what it means to be an atheist, we can now work with a real understanding of the many different world views that the atheist population includes. “The implications for public and social policy are substantial — and this study also stands to impact on more everyday interactions in religiously diverse societies.”

The global Understanding Unbelief programme to advance the scientific understanding of atheism and non-religion will present the results from its research at the Vatican in Rome.

– Unbelief in God does not necessarily entail unbelief in other supernatural phenomena and the majority of unbelievers in all countries surveyed expressed belief in one or more supernatural phenomena

– Unbelievers and general populations showed high agreement concerning the values most important for finding meaning in the world and your own life. Family and freedom ranked highly for all.

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You're Probably Married To The Wrong Person. Here's Why.

We're all looking for the 'right' person, but what if we're all the wrong person? Alain de Botton explains why no one is perfect for anyone.

To have a good marriage with our good-enough, but still wrong-for-us partners, we’ve got to become good teachers, de Botton explains. We’ve got to teach our partners how to treat us and teach them what we need, without humiliating them and making them feel small – because no one learns anything when they feel bad about themselves.

And we’ve got to become good learners, too. When someone tells us something about ourselves that makes us uncomfortable, we feel attacked. That’s often because they’re trying to get their message across by screaming or sulking, which is not the way to do it. “Most of us are terrible teachers,” says de Botton. “We teach when we’re tired, when we’re frightened.” Also, we sulk. We want our partners to read our minds; we don’t want to explain what we want or how we feel. “We reserve our sulkiness for people we love, who are supposed to love us,” he says. But, “if you don’t explain, you can never be understood.”

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20 things you didn't know about being left-handed - CNN

Here's a look at some of the most common facts about being left-handed, and what it might really mean for your health.

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Study Reveals Why Lefties Are Rare

Left-handers are rare because of the balance between cooperation and competition in human evolution.

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